DION: The hollowest of victories

As near as I can figure, I was driving to my mother’s house when the city blitzed a couple rundown apartment houses on County Street. I’ve been on vacation this week, as has my wife, fellow reporter Deborah Allard.

As near as I can figure, I was driving to my mother’s house when the city blitzed a couple rundown apartment houses on County Street. I’ve been on vacation this week, as has my wife, fellow reporter Deborah Allard.

We spent Tuesday at the Wrentham Outlets. We bought some nice clothes, too. Thursday was our anniversary and we planned to dine at a French restaurant in Bristol.

It was a pretty modest vacation and we spent a couple months saving money so we could buy clothing and food with much greater abandon than usual. You probably do the same thing, or some version of the same thing.

No one with a lot of money lives on County Street in Fall River. No one with a lot of money lives in the neighborhood where my wife and I own a three-decker.

Most of the time, that’s fine. In Fall River, in the tighter neighborhoods, you often wake up at night to the sound of drunks fighting in the street. Bums go through your trash, looking for deposit bottles. People have been shot within a couple blocks of my house.

But many of us maintain an attitude of upward striving. We plant flowers in our yards. We try to have our kids keep up in school. We have no involvement with drugs or gangs.

And if you live in one of these tighter neighborhoods, you know that the neighbors’ noise is your noise. Their rats are your rats. The junkies in the house on the corner will break into your car because it’s easier than leaving the block.

That’s why neighbors stood in the street smiling, clapping and sunning themselves in the glow of justice when cops and city inspectors cleared out an apartment house. The property was the site of homicides, shootings, gang activity, drug crimes and sexual assault.

Fall River’s battle for survival isn’t being fought in the “Arts Overlay District,” or the ill-defined “tourist areas.” It’s not being fought around the recently fixed-up “historically significant homes.”

It’s being fought out in the neighborhoods, where people street-park their cars just inches from other cars, where people still heat their apartments with one heater, which is always in the living room. It’s being fought in neighborhoods where the church and its school are both closed. It’s being fought in neighborhoods where people used to heave a deep sigh of relief after finally getting a $14 an hour job at Quaker Fabric. It’s being fought in neighborhoods where almost all forms of commerce are vanishing except the liquor store and the flourishing capitalism of the drug trade, where an empty storefront used to hold a bakery or a fish market.

And that’s the hell of it, really, that the people least able to fight a battle against decay and crime are being asked to fight it, every day. Many of the police officers and city workers go home to the nicer suburbs the end of their shift. The people of the neighborhoods do not.

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I am supposed to see the raid on County Street as one of several things. I’m supposed to see it as election year grandstanding. I’m supposed to see it as the city administration striking out bravely against slumlords and their tenants. I’m supposed to see it as an attack on those people “from someplace else” on whom Fall River blames all its problems.

Instead, I see two sets of people, grinding against each other in a neighborhood where there isn’t any work to speak of, where only the fewest of dollars separate the poor from the near poor, two sets of people trapped in the same place.

I can guarantee you there were people in those two buildings who were trying hard to live what we used to call a “decent life,” because any terrible place contains good people. And I can guarantee you that the people who live around those buildings are striving, planting flowers in their yards.

You can’t “tear down” poverty because poverty and its attendant miseries are not made of shingles and bricks.

The city moved to help the people of County Street who are fighting the battle, as are so many people in Fall River’s neighborhood.

But I feel bad because “throw those scumbags out” is not a plan for the future and because when the cops leave the neighborhood and the plywood goes up over the windows, that part of County Street is still a neighborhood in a city where there is no work.

And until that changes, until there is work, paychecks and work, the neighborhoods will be full of people grinding against each other, trapped and striving and waiting for work.